When we moved in seventeen autumns ago, my wife and I read aloud Dracula. The only other auditor was our lab-mutt puppy, who, thus forewarned, never did become a biter. (When our infant daughter came home from the hospital two winters later, I walked her to sleep to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Okay, so it’s not Goodnight, Moon, but at least it ain’t Blood Meridian.)
My parents order the same breakfasts at the same diners on the same days every single week, and I suppose I have inherited this orderliness in my seasonal reading habits. Come October, I take the same old friends off the bookshelf. I could no more grow tired of them than I could be bored by the resplendent reds and oranges of an Upstate fall.
First up is always Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which the Godlike Dan’l defends a New Hampshireman who has sold his soul to Scratch. (No, it wasn’t David Souter.) As my daughter and I read it this year, I thought about Webster, re-elected to Congress in 1814 on the “American Peace Ticket”—a name reeking of treason in our twenty-first-century America of perpetual war. William Dieterle made a superb film of Benet’s story, but why has no movie ever been made of Webster’s gargantuan life?
We read Poe, of course, and after the House of Usher collapses into the tarn, I eye the fissure in our foundation with a certain foreboding. Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with its sumptuous description of a Dutch repast, confirms my taste for oly koeks (whatever they are) over Little Debbies. Next up is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegory “Young Goodman Brown,” in which a Salem Puritan finds—or does he?—that “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.” The Cheney family motto, I’ll bet.
Why has no American novelist written about the strange yet fortifying friendship of Hawthorne and President Franklin Pierce? We’ve such a fantastically rich history, yet men drain away their days watching the living dead wrestle animated corpses on MSNBC and Fox.
I had approached Russell Kirk’s ghost stories with dread, fearing that on the scare-meter they’d register even lower than the supernatural tales (Turn of the Screw aside) of Henry James, in which, at most, a spinster’s petticoats are rustled by a draft. Yet Kirk’s ghostly tales, collected in Ancestral Shadows, cast a spell. I annually read “Saviourgate,” in which a harried man has a restorative whiskey and chat at a small hotel on the borderland between this world and the next; and “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond,” wherein a used-up man meets and emboldens his younger sorrowful self. There is, in Kirk’s diction and pace, a fustiness which in other writers might seem an affectation, but hey, who am I to complain about stylistic idiosyncrasies?
Here’s another book that ought to be: Ghost Stories by Reactionaries. To the finest of Kirk and James add tales (from Black Spirits and White) by the architect Ralph Adams Cram, who designed that most Octoberish of campuses, the Hudson River Gothic West Point. And throw in H.P. Lovecraft, upon whose headstone is incised one of my favorite epitaphs: “I AM PROVIDENCE.” Forget the Old Ones. The horrors of Cthulhu pale before this Lovecraft observation:
A man belongs where he has roots—where the landscape and milieu have some relation to his thoughts and feelings, by virtue of having formed them. A real civilization recognizes this fact—and the circumstance that America is beginning to forget it, does far more than does the mere matter of commonplace thought and bourgeois inhibitions to convince me that the general American fabric is becoming less and less a true civilization and more and more a vast, mechanical, and emotionally immature barbarism de luxe.
Now that is terrifying.
My Pen Pal Gore Vidal
The American Conservative, 2012
Now he belongs to the Ages. . . .
Well, why not? Edwin Stanton’s grandiloquent sendoff for the martyred Lincoln applies to Gore Vidal, author of the best fictive treatment our sixteenth president is ever likely to get. Plus it would have appealed to Gore’s fair vanity.
Gore Vidal’s favorite subject was his country. From Aaron Burr and Daniel Shays to Eugene V. Debs, America and its protagonists were his. This land was made for you and me? Of course it was.
So many healthy springs once fed our politics: they were rural, populist, patrician, pacifist, libertarian, anti-monopolist, prairie socialist, Main Street isolationist. Gore Vidal was explicator, dramatist, and even avatar of these American currents—which have no place in the dreary humorless social-democratic textbook history which bores our children and suffocates our discourse.
On a Sunday afternoon of torrential rains and crashing thunder (sound effects supplied by the Almighty in winking tribute to the anti-theist Vidal) I sat down and read through the sheaf of letters constituting our long epistolary friendship.
Each missive arrived in a pale blue envelope bearing the return address “La Rondinaia/Ravello (Salerno)/Italy.” His tone was often light self-mockery, unless the subject was, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Amused by Schlesinger’s surprisingly evenhanded review of one of my books, Vidal wrote, “As no bandwagon is complete without ‘there is this pendulum’ clinging to its buckboard, you seem to have launched a juggernaut out of Batavia.” Not exactly.)
Gore’s “favorite US pol (in my lifetime, that is)” was Huey Long, who had promised to make General Smedley “War is a Racket” Butler his Secretary of (Anti?) War. Cue the assassin’s bullet.
Vidal was an aristocratic populist. It was as if Henry Adams had fallen for William Jennings Bryan.
“As always, the unconsulted people are cowardly isolationists,” mused Gore as yet another of our endless wars began. Left-right rumblings against the empire heartened him: “They are terrified that anti-imperials will get together and revive America First, no bad rallying cry.”
I tried to get him to run in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, but he demurred: “If I had the energy, I’d make Huey Long seem like Robt Alphonso Taft—But too much sand’s slipped through the hourglass.”
While he saw the value of devolving power from the capital to the provinces, Vidal maintained an independent liberal’s skepticism of my decentralism, asserting that “if a state, exercising its rights, should wish to execute all spinsters over forty (my father’s dream!), then a Power Higher”—presumably a Bill of Rights-enforcing federal government—“must protect the minority from the majority.”
He enjoyed the sound of my hometown, and so his letters are filled with exhortations to “Preserve Batavia” and “Hail Batavia.” A decade ago he told me he was preparing to write a “counter-book” to my Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, but when one hits one’s octage, energy flags.
Vidal’s sense of place encompassed not only Ravello but his native Hudson Valley, especially his place of birth, West Point, of which he wrote: “what I find intolerable is the presence of women. Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things. Fortunately, we’ll never again win or, perhaps, fight a war based on the bonded squad. Girls with lasers in outer space will prevail.”
He rather liked the current laser-pointing schoolmarm, Hillary Clinton. When she visited him in Italy, he found her “unexpectedly droll and (expectedly) quick.” Curiously, the late Carl Oglesby, who headed SDS when it was healthily rebellious (before the Weathermen blew it apart), also insisted to me that Hillary, who had admired Carl in her Goldwater Girl goes Left phase, was sharp. In public, at least, she hides her little light well.
Another name from the ’90s, Newt Gingrich, has praised Vidal’s Lincoln, and Vidal had a soft spot for Newt, too. In early 1995 he predicted that “Newt will self-destruct but he’s the blueprint for the 1st (post-Lincoln) dictator—New Age, spacey, Fun.” Beats Dick Cheney.
Gore’s last line in his